IT assets accumulate as new applications and their corresponding infrastructure are deployed. The result is a hodgepodge of equipment purchased at different times. The running costs for older infrastructure, including power, cooling and data center space consumed, often exceed the benefits of using these existing assets.

IT processes become increasingly complex when dealing with a wide range of legacy assets, dragging operational efficiency down and increasing skills requirements without benefiting the IT services delivered to the business.

EMC Consulting recommends looking at asset costs in their entirety to get a full financial picture. This includes facilities, operations, and utilities. Examining costs this way allows you to rationalize assets into a more standardized infrastructure.

Standardizing on a modern, rationalized infrastructure can immediately reduce operating costs by deploying more power-efficient assets that reduce cooling costs. Standardized operational procedures can further reduce the time and associated costs for performing key IT operations. Simplifying skills requirements allows staff to take on more value-added responsibilities.

The amount of data and the number of branch offices in today’s enterprises continue to grow. IT groups are struggling to manage not only the applications and data at remote sites, but also to optimize the networked infrastructure supporting them.

Frequently half or more of an enterprise’s data resides at remote sites, where IT infrastructure can be costly to maintain. Servers, storage, communication equipment, IT staff, and floor space at remote locations are often incrementally increased to meet business needs. This can lead to cost, operational, and resource inefficiencies no organization can afford—especially in a global economy.

EMC consultants provide a better understanding of your remote infrastructure utilization. Let us create a plan that optimizes costs while managing risk and performance more effectively. We identify potential savings in a customized roadmap for implementing cost optimization initiatives. This approach can:

• Virtualize and consolidate assets at remote sites.
• Serve information across the network from the corporate data center.
• Optimize remote office backup/archiving and network costs.

Enterprises everywhere are challenged by rapidly increasing costs—whether due to rising energy expenses, organic growth, or global expansion. This growing budget and resource drain is often compounded by the need to manage multiple, geographically dispersed data centers.

IT infrastructures are quickly reaching capacity, yet many organizations are still underutilizing existing infrastructure assets. Consolidating underutilized infrastructure assets with virtualization technology can provide immediate power, cooling, and facilities cost benefits. Data center consolidation can provide increased economies of scale and improve efficiencies at the enterprise level. Comprehensive planning brings significant service-level, cost, and operational improvement during and after the consolidation.

A holistic, information-centric approach is needed, focusing on both business information and physical infrastructure. As companies consolidate or relocate data centers, business disruption must be minimized. It is critically important to map application and infrastructure interdependencies and schedule moves and consolidations based upon the information’s importance to the business. This approach consolidates infrastructure with less risk, in the shortest time and most cost-effective way.

Enterprise infrastructures frequently evolve into islands of applications and supporting infrastructure. The accumulation of disparate application infrastructures makes it difficult to share operational best practices, hinders pooling of resources, and limits economies of scale.

IT’s efforts to merge application infrastructures are often met with resistance by application owners, concerned that the priority of their performance or operational support will be reduced.

EMC Consulting believes that the conversation between application and infrastructure teams should change. The basis for this new conversation is a service catalog with differentiated service levels at defined cost points.

Application owners can understand the tradeoffs in different tiers of a service catalog when expressed in cost and benefit terms. They will then naturally select the tier that matches their business requirements. The resulting realignment of applications to different service tiers can generate substantial savings, particularly when coupled with financial management such as chargeback. These savings come from deploying lower cost infrastructure for lower service tiers, as well as optimizing operations to service tiers across the enterprise.